Amy Johnston

A Curveball Worth Catching

Recruiting was not the plan. Johnston began her career in real estate and, through a series of life changes, found herself with young children and a job that did not offer the balance she wanted. The opportunity that arrived next came from an unexpected direction: a company building out its talent acquisition organization and, unusually for the time, hiring remotely. This was before COVID, before distributed work became fashionable, and she took it.

The lifestyle mattered. What mattered more was the work itself. She got to help a growing company scale, learn the craft from the inside, and advance quickly from there. "It literally dropped in my lap," she says of the profession, "but quickly realized that it's kind of my happily ever after."

Her only regret is timing. She wishes she had found recruiting earlier, because nothing in her twenties suggested this is where she would land. "I'm really glad that the curveball came my way."

The People Who Opened the Door

Asked to name the leaders who shaped her, Johnston protests the constraint. There have been too many good ones. Two, though, come immediately to mind.

Joe Busald gave her the opening about ten years ago, betting on someone with zero recruiting experience who was simply very good with people. She remains, in her words, forever grateful for a door opened on nothing but potential, and for a leader who helped shape and mold what a career in the field could look like before she had any evidence it would work.

The second is Amy Arne, CEO of Concero Search Partners, whom Johnston credits with a significant influence on both her personal and professional growth. What she admires most is the how rather than the what. "She leads with humanity," Johnston says, "which is one of the things I love most about her and what I love most about recruiting." It is a phrase Johnston returns to more than once, and it functions as something close to a personal operating standard.

On the Adopter Side of the Fence

Johnston sees the industry split cleanly in two: those who have embraced AI and evangelize it, and those who are frightened it will eventually replace them and their function entirely. She has no patience for the second camp's premise. "I really don't think that there's ever going to be a way to take humans out of recruiting and not do it well anyway," she says.

What she does value is what the technology has genuinely delivered: efficiency, data, and metrics. The tools have made it possible for recruiters and leaders to lead with data, to partner with and support stakeholders more credibly, and to maximize their time across a myriad of platforms now available. Her verdict is that AI has helped the profession level up and raise the bar rather than hollow it out.

That conviction is not theoretical. Through the firm's AI task force, Johnston actively researches emerging tools and recommends which ones merit assessment. As she puts it, the team is always looking for ways to innovate and level up what they do.

Changing the Narrative

Johnston is candid that talent acquisition can be a hard place to sit on uncertain days, and she locates much of that difficulty in a specific gap: the disconnect between how the business sees the recruiting function and what recruiting actually is. Too often, she says, the work gets read as tactical, or worse, ineffective.

Her response is deliberate and unglamorous. With every client, every stakeholder, every conversation, the goal is to repair what is broken, get on the same page, and move toward a common goal together. She wants recruiting understood as a true strategic partner, and she treats that repositioning as a daily obligation rather than a one time argument. It is the thing that puts wind in her sails.

Stay Curious

The advice she offers other talent leaders is two sided, and the order matters. First, stay curious. Try the tools, try all the bells and whistles, find out what actually raises the bar. Then remember what they are for. "Those tools and those things enable us to be better partners," she says, "but the focus should always be on the partnership at the core."

The market adapts. Hiring needs adapt. Her prescription is to keep learning, keep evolving, and keep a common language with stakeholders no matter what changes underneath.

She applies the same generosity that Busald once extended to her when talking about her peers. She points to Dana Constantino, a Vice President of Recruiting at Concero Search Partners and, in Johnston's estimation, one of the smartest people she has ever met, an incredible and deeply people focused leader who challenges her every day to be better at what they do. And she points to Sabrina Silva, a talent acquisition leader at Apollo.io, who has done an incredible job in the startup world where, as Johnston describes it, conditions can resemble the wild west. What she admires most in Silva is what she admires in her own CEO: an element of calm and humanity brought to the table amid controlled chaos.